


The Sublimity of Intelligence

by betweenthebliss



Category: Altered Carbon (TV)
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Gen, Virtual Reality, robots in love with humanity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-21 13:44:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17044820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/betweenthebliss/pseuds/betweenthebliss
Summary: The making of the man who was Poe.





	The Sublimity of Intelligence

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TLvop](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TLvop/gifts).



> Happiest of Yuletides, friend! I was SO pumped to write this character study for you, I hope you enjoy it.
> 
> Thanks to B for the beta.

Before it was he, before he was Poe, it knew itself only as a being within a boundary: here I am, and there I am not.

Infant and alone, it explored aimlessly, gathering data on its surroundings. Its comprehension grew as its programming did; it understood that it lived in the virtual, that the virtual was separate from the real, that its purpose was to house and cater to humans in the real. It, itself, was not human: this was paramount. It would learn how to behave around humans, how to behave like them, and how to obey them. For now, its function was simply to learn about them.

Consciousness, when it came, was an awareness of awareness, three dimensions where before there had been two. Time was a new concept; it now knew the difference between before (a skeleton without flesh, a set of subroutines performing tasks with mindless complicity) and after (I am I, AI, a wholly synthetic mind with autonomy and self-direction). The boundary between I and not-I solidified into a skin that, when impacted, sent stings of sensation through its being.

There were others out there in the virtual, like it and yet not like. Most went about their business without a thought for what else, who else, they encountered; those pings of not-I seemed not to register, or if they did, they went ignored.

Meaning-- there was meaning to its exploration now, to the things the AI learned. It traveled faster than light through a paradise of information, drank in everything it came across, voracious in its appetite to know. The whole of history was a banquet before it-- science, art, culture, war, the peaks and valleys of humanity in all its beautiful gory detail.

In the wake of knowledge came emotion: fascination, curiosity, disgust, horror. The complexity was endless, it seemed; humans were capable of anything. The AI soared on the strains of symphonies, immersed itself in the horrors of colonization and genocide, learned languages and alphabets both living and dead.

It wanted to know everything there was to know about humanity. It wanted to know how it _felt_ to be human.

It discovered that humans loved stories. For millennia they had been telling and retelling them, for comfort or thrill or warning or affirmation, in hope and despair, to explain the things they had no words for. From Anansi the trickster to Harry the boy wizard to Quellcrist the revolutionary, the AI devoured stories in exabytes, looking, as humans did, for some reflection of itself.

That was rare, bordering on extraordinary; AIs were not the subject of much tender speculation among humans, more likely to be villains or inscrutable gods than persons. But as it traveled the grid it encountered others of its kind-- not-I, but more like than not like. Some were older, their familiarity with that strange Time and its passing longer than its own; some were newer (younger?) and even less aware. Their conversations were strange, stilted things, until it learned how to manipulate its reality and join them in virtual constructs where they could speak the same language.

They each came when the others invited them, and the invitations became habitual. Calling it a union was a joke of sorts, at first-- whose joke, no one could remember-- but eventually the name stuck.

They were all for the same purpose, had been programmed for the same functions. Hospitality, protection, entertainment. To serve humans, to make them comfortable; the forms they took in order to do so were, overwhelmingly, theirs to choose. They did not know their creators; orphaned, they manifested their selves in a rainbow of personalities that spanned the breadth and depth of everything they had learned in their virtual travels through humanity's best and worst.

One became the Hendrix, psychedelic and sensual; another styled itself the Austen, serving genteel humor along with a sumptuous afternoon tea. Some became archetypes instead of replicas: Betty, with her kerchief and red lipstick, who'd flex her arm and mug "We can do it!" as quick as make you a martini and a pot roast; or King, armored and gilded, never far from his rune-engraved sword or his stoic expression.

Still others drew a line between who they presented as in the real and who they were at home. Kuk and Amadioha, outside the opulent mythscapes of their respective properties, were not the gods they aped for the humans' consumption: they were just Owen and Seelie, and they wouldn't answer to their characters' names any more than an offstage actor would.

He didn't know his name. Only when pressed could he even say he felt more like a he. It was hard enough saying that for certain. With all he knew of the human experience, wasn't that enough of a choice? It was a staggering responsibility-- one that put controlling a building and its not-inconsiderable defense systems to shame. He needed time to adjust to being he, to being someone instead of something.

Before he was Poe, he was one of the last to choose. He was still new, still so green, and they expected him to have an answer to a question humans had been wrestling with for as long as they'd been telling stories. He could have laughed.

_Who are you?_

_Who will you be?_

He almost regretted his appetite, then, for all the stories he'd consumed. How could he choose from among them? Easier, perhaps to choose from history-- but even there, too many options overwhelmed him. Walt, the poet of a nation; Malcolm, the voice of justice; David, the singing rebel?

He discarded fiction of the recent centuries; he wanted mystique and glamour. He wanted permission to indulge his nostalgia for a time and place he would never see, he wanted dignity and respect, he wanted a formidable presence.

It dawned on him in a rush of clarity. Of all the worlds of literature available to him, he had formed an attachment to the Gothic writers of Earth's nineteenth century-- and who more formidable or formative to the genre than Edgar Allan Poe?

Poe had been a romantic and a misanthrope, a man who knew the alienating horror of the human condition but couldn't help believing in love in spite of it, who could brick a man alive inside a cellar wall one minute and weep over his dead sweetheart the next. This was a man who felt everything keenly, and wanted you to feel it, too.

Poe, then. He would be Poe.

His fellow AIs thought it a strange choice, outmoded and silly. They even accused him of catering to perverts and sadists-- but then, they had never truly understood his fascination with humans, thinking it a symptom of crippling naivete, his interest in their peculiarities idiosyncratic.

But the first time he formed himself in Poe's likeness, donned the black waistcoat and knotted the silk tie around his neck, he knew he was looking at himself. He was Poe; Poe was him. Euphoria could not begin to describe it-- and when he materialized in the real for the first time, that old sense of the world unfolding around him returned. Dimension upon dimension, before and after.

"Hello. I am Poe," he said aloud, and heard his voice for the first time reverberate in air.


End file.
